What’s at
stake: Exposure of the longstanding imperial
ambitions of key figures in the Bush administration leads to questions of accountability, crime, and punishment, if
we are ever to deter the war-makers.

Exclusive:
As the U.S. observes the
tenth anniversary of the Iraq
invasion, a key question remains: Why was there almost no accountability for
journalists and pundits who went along with George W. Bush’s deceptions. The
answer can be found in the cover-ups of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, writes
Robert Parry.

by Tariq Ali. Verso, 2004 ed. 2003
first ed. available in Mullins Library, UAF. Publisher’s Description: The bestselling history of the
resistance in Iraq that vitalized the antiwar movement, fully updated.The
assault and capture of Iraq — and the resistance it has provoked — will shape
the politics of the twenty-first century. In this passionate and provocative
book, Tariq Ali provides a history of Iraqi resistance against empires old and new, and argues against the view that sees imperialist
occupation as the only viable solution to bring about regime-change in
corrupt and dictatorial states. Like the author’s previous work, The
Clash of Fundamentalisms, this book presents a magnificent cultural
history.Detailing
the longstanding imperial ambitions of key figures in the Bush administration
and how war profiteers close to Bush are cashing in, Bush in Babylon is
unique in moving beyond the corporate looting by the US military government
to offer the reader an expert and in-depth analysis of the extent of
resistance to the US occupation in Iraq.
On 15 February 2003, eight million people marched on the streets of five
continents against a war that had not yet begun. A historically unprecedented
number of people rejected official justifications for war that the secular
Ba'ath Party of Iraq was connected to al-Qaeda or that “weapons of mass
destruction” existed in the region, outside of Israel.

More people than ever are convinced that the greatest threat to peace comes
from the center of the American empire and its satrapies, with Blair and
Sharon as lieutenants to the Commander-in-Chief. Examining how countries from
Japan to France eventually rushed to support US aims, as well as the futile
UN resistance, Tariq Ali proposes a re-founding of Mark Twain's mammoth
American Anti-Imperialist League (which included William James, W.E.B.
DuBois, William Dean Howells, and John Dewey) to carry forward the antiwar
movement. Meanwhile, as Iraqis show unexpected hostility and independence,
rather than gratitude, for “liberation,” Ali is unique is uncovering the depth of the
resistance now occurring inside occupied Iraq.

The
United Nations says at least 1,375 people were killed in Iraq last month,
making it one of the country’s deadliest in years. The January toll follows
more than 12,000 deaths in 2014, Iraq’s most lethal year since 2008.

The film is an
investigative documentary, in the style of Taxi to the Dark Side and Fahrenheit 9/11. Unlike those films,
however, it is told entirely through expert interviewees, favorable and
critical, and the testimony of Rice herself. There is no voice-over narration,
a technique that heightens the film's objectivity. There are exclusive
interviews with three of Rice's most authoritative biographers: Marcus Mabry,
an editor at the New York Times and
author of Twice As Good: Condoleezza Rice and her path to power; Glenn Kessler, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, diplomatic
correspondent at the Washington Post and
author of The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush
Legacy; and Antonia Felix, author of Condi: The Condoleezza Rice
Story.

The film tells the story
of Rice's life from her birth in 1954 to her 2009 departure from office as
Secretary of State, and her return to Stanford University. Rice is a key
interviewee in the film: she speaks about her roots in racially explosiveBirmingham; her short-lived music career; her
fascination with Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan; her close friendship with
George W. Bush; right up to a defense of her record in government. The film
gives voice to numerous supporters of Rice, including both Presidents Bush; her
stepmother Clara Bailey Rice; Oprah Winfrey (who remarks that
"I've never been more proud to say the word W-O-M-A-N than after meeting
Condoleezza Rice"); mentor and later critic, Brent Scowcroft; her former fiancé, Rick Upchurch; John McCain who praises her as "a
great American"; former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Dick Cheney; and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The film charts Rice's
discovery of her love of politics at the University of Denver,
and her pursuit and use of power. The title's reference to Faust echoes
allegations made by various interviewees in the film that she sacrificed her
principles in exchange for political power. Author Laura Flanders relates how she rolled
back affirmative action policies while Stanford University Provost, and how she
was such a loyal board member for Chevron (despite
its involvement with the Nigerian government in violently repressing Ogoni tribespeople)
that they named an oil tanker after her. Her record as National Security
Advisor is attacked by CIA Director George Tenet, Counter-Terrorism chief
(1992–2003) Richard Clarke and
author Philip
Shenon. They allege that she ignored various warnings in the spring
and summer of 2001 that an Al Qaedaattack was about
to happen. Shenon alleges that "it was both incompetence and
negligence." Rice responds to these allegations: "I just don't buy
the argument that we weren't shaking the trees enough and that something was
gonna to fall out that gave us somehow that little piece of information that
would have led to connecting all of those dots."[1]

Kessler and Mabry concur
that, after 9/11, she abandoned realism and advocacy of a humble foreign
policy, and became a neo-conservative idealist (hence the film's subtitle,
'from Condi to Neo-Condi'). With huge political pressure coming from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to invade Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, says she
deliberately exaggerated the case for war ("we don't want the smoking gun
to be a mushroom cloud").[2]Congressman Robert Wexler says that Rice misled the
American public on 56 occasions, which Rice denies: "I did not pump up
anything".[3]Eleanor Clift, (Editor of Newsweek)
and Richard Ben-Veniste (9/11
Commissioner), point to the many techniques that Rice used – wordplay,
filibustering, claims of amnesia – to avoid telling the truth. Investigating
her record on race, Marcus Mabry states that it was Hurricane Katrina when black Americans
realized she was not fighting their corner. Spike Lee criticizes her for going shoe
shopping on Madison Avenue while the levees were breaking. Critics also
question her record as Secretary of State, especially her handling of the 2007
killing of 17 Iraqi civilians byBlackwater contractors
in her hire. Erica Razook of Amnesty International,
states that Rice acted to protect the State Department's $1bn contract with
Blackwater by pardoning the killers and offering only $10,000 in compensation.
That response, according to US Congressman David
Price, inflamed Iraqi anger towards all Americans. Price says:
"It contradicts our values. It makes us out to be hypocrites. It puts our
military personnel in jeopardy. All I can see is a dereliction of duty. At
virtually any level you'd want to assess this, this is a disaster for our
country."

The film documents
Rice's vigorous support for the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, which she describes as "a
necessity because of the War on Terror." Most notably in terms of
historical discovery, the film reveals that it was National Security Advisor
Rice who directly authorized the CIA to use torture techniques in 'black sites'
around the world.Glenn Kessler says:
"These 'enhanced interrogation methods' included water-boarding,
fingernail extraction, and sleep deprivation. Condi signed off on the orders to
the CIA with the words, 'This is your Baby, go do it!'" Richard Clarkeconcurs: "Rice decided what
torture to use on what person." Rice denies these allegations, saying
"we did not torture anybody". This statement is then contradicted by
interviews with individuals subjected to these interrogation techniques:
British detainee Binyam Mohamed describes
how he had his penis cut, and acid poured into the wounds;[4]Khalid El-Masri relates how he was
drugged, sodomized and imprisoned without charges, an allegation supported by
theAmerican
Civil Liberties Union[5]Abu Omar describes how he was tied to a
wet mattress and electrocuted; and Mamdouh Habib claims he had his
fingernails torn out. The film is the first to draw the dots between Rice as
NSA, through the CIA, to the actual individuals who underwent the 'enhanced
interrogation techniques.' The film was also the first source to reveal the
'black site' countries to which Rice and the CIA sent detainees to be
interrogated, including Thailand, Somalia,Italy, Kenya, Ethiopia, Syria, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Macedonia, Egypt, Morocco, Azerbaijan, as well as the 'torture ships' USS
Peleliu, USS Bataan, and USS Ashland.[6]
MORE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Faust:_From_Condi_to_Neo-Condi

CHRIS KYLE

FILMS ABOUT US WARS

“Our love for [our war stories] is insatiable as if
we believe the nobility of the soldier is a way to convince us of our own
national decency. . . .’Vietnam films are all pro-war, no matter what the
supposed message,’ Anthony Swofford writes in Jarhead. When a war’s
justification is based on lies and deceit, or perhaps especially when a war’s
justification is based on lies and deceit, the hope remains that good Americans
caught in hellish circumstances will rise to the occasion, at least for each
other. Forget the dishonorable
foundations to the war. Focus on the
honor of service.” Moustafa Bayoumi,
“War Stories from Soldiers and Body Washers,” The Progressive (Feb. 2015), a review of Klay’s Redeployment and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, a rare and immensely needed novel about the war
from the perspective of Iraqi civilians.
No book about “our troops” should be read, reviewed, or discussed
without at the same time reading, reviewing, and discussing a book about the
real victims of US wars.

Richard Falk [American Sniper was released on
Christmas Day, 2014. It is a movie version of Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the
Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, with 255 kills, 160 officially
confirmed by the Department of Defense. The movie set in Iraq is directed by
Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper plays the part of Chris Kyle, and Sienna Miller
is brilliantly cast in the role of his wife, Taya] [I deleted the opening paragraphs of the
review. For the full review go to

These narratives dominated my
perception of the movie, although those associated with its production deny
such lines of interpretation. Clint Eastwood (the director and producer) and
Bradley Cooper (who plays Kyle in the film) have publicly questioned employing
a political optic in commentary on the film. They insist, in contrast, that the
movie was ‘a character study’ of Kyle and ‘apolitical’ in the sense of not
taking a position pro or con the Iraq War. Eastwood has tried to lend
credibility to his claim by pointing out that he opposed the Iraq War, and was
even skeptical about Afghanistan. Yet whatever he privately feels this not how
most viewers most viewers would experience the film, either being enthralled by
Kyle’s exploits or appalled by them. Eastwood may have aspired to tell an
apolitical story, but if so, he has failed badly.

The Iraq War was a war of
aggression undertaken in 2003 despite the rejection of a well-orchestrated (and
misleading) American plea to the UN Security Council for authorization. Against
such a background, the attack on Iraq and subsequent occupation were
widely regarded as international crimes bearing resemblance to the category of
aggressive warfare for which German and Japanese leaders were punished for
waging after World War II. In this light, the Iraqi violence associated with
the hostile American occupation needs to be portrayed as a unilateral
repudiation of the limits set by international law and the UN Charter on
recourse to war by the world’s most powerful country. Additionally, American
Sniper depicts the doomed efforts of an outgunned society to resist a
militarily dominant foreign invader that is imposing its will on the country’s
future by force of arms. Such a viewing is not meant to imply that we need to
endorse some of the horrific Iraqi tactics relied upon, but it should remind us
that presenting the Iraqis as ‘evil’ and as ‘savages’ functions in the film as
an unchallenged display of Islamophobic propaganda, and cannot be credibly
explained away as a realistic exploration of a war hero’s temperament and
struggle for sanity and survival. American Sniper also
presents Kyle’s story in such a way as to avoid any self-criticism directed at
the American mission in Iraq.

The movie also lacks
redeeming artistic merit. It is relentless and repetitive in portraying battle
scenes of intensity intertwined with Kyle’s tormented relationship with his
wife and efforts to become a father to their two children during his brief
interludes of home leave between military assignments. We learn nothing about
the realities of our world beyond a tired rendering of the embedded post-9/11
polemic on the necessity of foreign wars to keep America safe from evil forces
lurking in the Islamic world. This orthodoxy is not even interrogated, much
less rejected. And no where in the film is there any acknowledgement that the
United States in Iraq was acting in defiance of international law and causing
great devastation and suffering to a totally vulnerable foreign country, as
well as producing a massive displacement of the civilian population. Leaving
behind a devastated country and widespread chaos. The Iraqi experience of such
carnage in their own country is treated as irrelevant, and is reminiscent of
Vietnam War films that were mostly devoted to explorations of the victimization
of the young Americans caught up in an experience of war that they could neither
understand nor win, while overlooking almost altogether the massive suffering
being inflicted on a foreign people in a distant land. That is, even most
anti-war portrayals of these American wars accept the dehumanization of the
foreign others.

For me the most significant
impressions resulting from American Sniper’s narrative of the
Iraq War are as follows:

–the
striking imbalance between the sophisticated military technology at the
disposal of the United States versus the primitive weaponry in the possession
of the Iraqi adversaries, creating an overwhelming impression that the Iraq War
was more ‘a hunt’ than ‘a war;’ such an impression is somehow deepened by a
scene in the film in which Kyle is teaching his very young son to hunt for
deer;

–the
failure to make any effort at all to understand the experience of this war from
the perspective of the Iraqis, creating the absurd impression that the only
victims deserving empathy were Americans like Kyle who had endured the torments
of warfare and suffered its admittedly disorienting consequences; the emotions
of remorse as associated with the harm done to Iraq and Iraqis is no where to
be found in the film.

What
may be disturbing is the radical subjectivity of likely audience responses. In
America, great popularity of mostly uncritical commentary on American
Sniper, reinforcing the regressive national mood of glamorizing bloody
military exploits as the most admirable expression of true patriotism.
Elsewhere in the world the perception is likely to be quite opposite: American
Sniperinducing anti-American attitudes either out of fear or resentment or
both, solidifying the global image of the United States as a cruel geopolitical
bully. That is, American Sniper is wildly pro-American for
most domestic viewers, and severely anti-American for most foreign viewers.
This gap in subjectivities exhibits the degree to which Americans are living in
a bubble of their own devising.

It
is highly unlikely that many Americans will appreciate this disparity of
perception, and even fewer will pause long enough to assess its significance.
If more of us could see ourselves as we are seen in the mirror of foreign
reactions it might help end this unhealthy national romance with permanent war
that started after World War II with the Cold War and continues now in the form
of the ‘War on Terror.’ Such a pattern of delusional geopolitics will
never produce peace and security in the 21st century, and will
fatally divert attention from meeting the challenges of humanity associated
with climate change, nuclear weapons, poverty, and extremism. To question this
American domination project is to antagonize the entrenched bureaucratic,
media, and neoliberal forces that benefit from endless war making and its
associated expenditures of trillions. In the end it is this grand project of
late capitalism that American Sniper indirectly vindicates,
thereby burdening the nation and the world, perhaps fatally.

________________________

Richard Falk is
a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar,
professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author,
co-author or editor of 40 books, and a speaker and activist on world
affairs. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed
Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on “the situation
of human rights in the Palestinian
territories occupied since 1967.” Since 2002 he has lived
in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University
of California in Global and International Studies, and since 2005 chaired the
Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. His most recent book is Achieving
Human Rights(2009).

Chris
Kyle built his reputation as a sniper during one of the most criminal
operations of the entire occupation of Iraq, the 2nd siege of Fallujah.

What American
Sniper offers us — more than a heart-wrenching tale about Chris Kyle’s
struggle to be a soldier, a husband, and a father; more than an action packed
story about America’s most lethal sniper — is an exposure of the often hidden
side of American war culture.
The criminality that has characterized American military engagements since the
American Indian Wars, and most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, is hardly
noticeable in this film. And that’s exactly my point...

The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically
Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass
that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything
George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.

No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD
search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger
bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.

But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated
two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is
there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very
slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding,
that was a hard one to see coming.

Sniper is
a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal
circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to
take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar
worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the
war in question.

It's the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense
to so many people, that's the problem. "American Sniper has
the look of a bona fide cultural phenomenon!" gushed Brandon
Griggs of CNN, noting the film's record $105 million opening-week
box office.

Griggs added, in a review that must make Eastwood swell with
pride, that the root of the film's success is that "it's about a real
person," and "it's a human story, not a political one."

Well done, Clint! You made a movie about mass-bloodshed in Iraq
that critics pronounced not political! That's as Hollywood as
Hollywood gets.

The characters in Eastwood's movies almost always wear white and
black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who's the good guy on
the one hand, and whose exploding head we're to applaud on the other.

Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass
stupidities in the movie. There's the obligatory somber scene of shirtless
buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the
televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq
actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between
9/11 and Iraq.

Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed
the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding
ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in
the film, though, because it would detract from the "human story."

Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by
Hollywood standards when one of Kyle's officers suggests that they could
"win the war" by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting
America's peaceful occupation of Sadr City.

When hunky Bradley Cooper's Kyle character subsequently takes out
Mustafa with Skywalkerian long-distance panache – "Aim small, hit
small," he whispers, prior to executing an impossible mile-plus shot –
even the audiences in the liberal-ass Jersey City theater where I watched the
movie stood up and cheered. I can only imagine the response this scene scored
in Soldier of Fortune country.

To Eastwood, this was probably just good moviemaking, a scene
designed to evoke the same response he got in Trouble With the
Curve when his undiscovered Latin Koufax character, Rigoberto Sanchez,
strikes out the evil Bonus Baby Bo Gentry (even I cheered at that scene).

The problem of course is that there's no such thing as
"winning" the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to
mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real
sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues
to this day to spread beyond Iraq's borders.

Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that
killing Mustafa was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that
kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It's a
scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from
Seattle to Savannah.

The really dangerous part of this film is that it turns into a
referendum on the character of a single soldier. It's an unwinnable argument in
either direction. We end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not
about the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle
and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and
children.

They're the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has
mostly been over just how much of a "hero" Chris Kyle really was. One
Academy member wondered to a reporter if Kyle (who in real life was killed by a
fellow troubled vet in an eerie commentary on the violence in our society that
might have made a more interesting movie) was a "psychopath." Michael Moore absorbed a ton
of criticism when he tweeted that "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2.
We were taught snipers were cowards …"

And plenty of other commentators,
comparing Kyle's book (where he remorselessly brags about killing
"savages") to the film (where he is portrayed as a more rounded
figure who struggled, if not verbally then at least visually, with the nature
of his work), have pointed out that real-life Kyle was kind of a dick compared
to movie-Kyle.

(The most disturbing passage in the book to me was the one where
Kyle talked about being competitive with other snipers, and how when one in
particular began to threaten his "legendary" number, Kyle "all
of the sudden" seemed to have "every stinkin' bad guy in the city
running across my scope." As in, wink wink, my luck
suddenly changed when the sniper-race got close, get it? It's super-ugly
stuff).

The thing is, it always looks bad when you
criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be
seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because
most wars are about something much larger than that, too.

They did this after Vietnam, when America spent decades watching
movies like Deer Hunter and First Blood and Coming
Home about vets struggling to reassimilate after the madness of the
jungles. So we came to think of the "tragedy" of Vietnam as something
primarily experienced by our guys, and not by the millions of Indochinese we
killed.

That doesn't mean Vietnam Veterans didn't suffer: they did, often
terribly. But making entertainment out of their dilemmas helped Americans turn
their eyes from their political choices. The movies used the struggles of
soldiers as a kind of human shield protecting us from thinking too much about
what we'd done in places like Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.

This is going to start happening now with the War-on-Terror
movies. As CNN's Griggs writes, "We're finally ready for a movie about the
Iraq War." Meaning: we're ready to be entertained by stories about how
hard it was for our guys. And it might have been. But that's not the whole
story and never will be.

We'll make movies about the Chris Kyles of the world and argue
about whether they were heroes or not. Some were, some weren't. But in public
relations as in war, it'll be the soldiers taking the bullets, not the suits in
the Beltway who blithely sent them into lethal missions they were never
supposed to understand.

And filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only
muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human
story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context,
and this is one of them.

Posted on Jan 25, 2015. Forwarded by Abel T.

“American Sniper”
lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture,
the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as
a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a
grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of
inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking
and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in
a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed
moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These
passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open
society.

The
movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the
animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.

“Get
back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”

“Yes,
sir,” the boy answers.

“That
was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a
fine hunter some day.”

The
camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white
Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are
listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s
title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper
in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by
God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family
dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three
types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer
to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their
doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And
then you got predators.”

The
camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.

“They
use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then
there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to
protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They
are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”

The
father lashes his belt against the dining room table.

“I will
whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect
our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you
have my permission to finish it.”

There is
no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We
elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed
forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have
little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular
communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They
prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get
into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the
media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic
self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like
the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt
deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is
a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it
made a record-breaking
$105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a
symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.

“The
movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting
back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached
by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is
a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious
Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism
within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally
one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the
fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of
‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a
literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.”

Weinstein
noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or
Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America,
is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the
Army Special Forces.

The
evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when
television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the 1998
truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in
which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother,
aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on
the screen about a “war” against the United States.

“Look
what they did to us,” Chris whispers.

He heads
down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp
scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become
real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and
comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits
have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until they are
part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority,
which means, of course, they are sheep.

We get a
love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie slips, as
it often does, into clichéd dialogue.

She
tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie
and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”

“Why
would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my
country.”

“Why?”

“Because
it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,”
he says.

She
drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in
love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next
room.

“Oh, my
God, Chris,” she says.

“What’s
wrong?” he asks.

“No!”
she yells.

Then we
hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what looks
like the east side. …”

Chris
and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s soundtrack. The
evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will
go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that
columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked “because we could.” The
historical record and the reality of the Middle East don’t matter. Muslims are
Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, “savages.” Evildoers
have to be eradicated.

Chris
and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white shirt under
his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony.

“Just
got the call, boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the wedding reception.

The Navy
SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is Tour One. Kyle,
now a sniper, is told Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be the only accurate
analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out against Native
Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do “head shots from 500 yards
out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics.”

Kyle’s
first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young woman in a
black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy’s death, picks
up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on patrol.
Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for the film and Kyle’s
best-selling autobiography, “American Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq
don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed to make little
suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim
evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child. They are beasts. They are shown
in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on their cellphones,
hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors, planting improvised explosive
devices in roads or strapping explosives onto themselves in order to be suicide
bombers. They are devoid of human qualities.

“There
was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says nonchalantly after
shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his cot with a big Texas
flag behind him on the wall. “Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out there
to kill Marines.”

Enter
The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the
most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and
dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see a
child’s arm he amputated. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for
$100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in
front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to
them, you die with them.”

Kyle
moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in the film
is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband being away. Kyle
says before he leaves: “They’re savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.”

He and
his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the Punisher from
Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets. The motto
they paint in a circle around the skull reads: “Despite what your momma told
you … violence does solve problems.”

“And we
spray-painted it on every building and walls we could,” Kyle wrote in his
memoir, “American Sniper.” “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we want
to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us
because we will kill you, motherfucker.”

The book
is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant warrior,
one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He is
consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is credited
with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be
witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around
where we couldn’t see him before he bled out he didn’t count.”

Kyle
insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be
self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation
many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers
are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his
denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to
an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to
childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his
contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing
with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow
SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is,
at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book,
swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental.

“Sentimentality,
the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of
dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James
Baldwin reminded us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his
aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always,
therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”

“Savage,
despicable evil,” Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops and windows.
“That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself
included, called the enemy ‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.” At
another point he writes: “I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I
still do … it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” He labels
Iraqis “fanatics” and writes “they hated us because we weren’t Muslims.” He
claims “the fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation
of religion.”

“I never
once fought for the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies. “I could give a
flying fuck about them.”

He
killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the boy’s
mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.

He
wrote: “If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away from
the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them
try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?”

“People
back home [in the U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at least not that war,
sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he went on.
“They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things
we saw.”

He was
investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According to his
memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army colonel: “I
don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation
went nowhere.

Kyle was
given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I
wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I
hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following
a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back
to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars
and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something
omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He
dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers,
exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white,
“Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone
who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.

“For
some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we
were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent
death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose
ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human
being could maintain.”

The
enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer,
fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job. In the movie Kyle
returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This
final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and
the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic
duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously
cartoonish.

Kyle
gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving
the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s
head turns into a puff of blood.

“Biggles
would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”

His
final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the
demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and
works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his
combat boots for cowboy boots.

The
real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting
range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A
former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe
psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s
pickup truck. Routh will go
on trial next month. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral
procession—thousands lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at
the Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents
into the top of his coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back
and the back of his head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw
his killer when the fatal shots were fired.

The culture of war banishes the
capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual
humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing,
as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New
SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they
passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those
who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on
obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and
demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This
culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of
human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the
cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for
difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war
and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the
nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders.
This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters
an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into
the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes
treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a
deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief
that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American
fascism. [End Hedges’ Rev.]

Ten years ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was only hours
away, but the case for this unprovoked war was already falling apart with
exposure of hyperbole, half-truths and even a forgery. On March 18, 2003, a
group of U.S. intelligence veterans pleaded with President George W. Bush to
postpone the attack.

Many Americans forget how intimidating it
was a decade ago for any U.S.
citizen to speak out against President George W. Bush’s rush to war with Iraq. For
example, the Dixie Chicks got death threats and actor Sean Penn was denounced
as “a stooge of Saddam,” as Norman Solomon recalls.

Exclusive: Toting up the Iraq War’s cost is
staggering, including nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis dead. But a decade later, few of its architects in government or
apologists in the press have faced accountability. Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt for one, notes
Robert Parry. [See above on Condoleezza
Rice.]

Exclusive: Americans today know a lot more about Iraq
than they did ten years ago, knowledge gained painfully from the blood of
soldiers and civilians. But a crucial question remains: why did George W.
Bush and his neocon advisers rush headlong into this disastrous war, a
mystery Robert Parry unwinds.

The Iraq War killed almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers
and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The destruction also shamed the
consciences of decent Americans who must now face the fact that the only real
accountability has been exacted against whistleblowers like Pvt. Bradley
Manning, writes Kathy Kelly.

The tenth anniversary of the Iraq War has understandably
focused on the thousands upon thousands of people killed and the chaos
unleashed. But the war also dealt a harsh blow to the legal principles that
U.S. leaders helped enshrine after World War II, as Marjorie Cohn noted in this
excerpt from “Cowboy Republic.”

From the Archive: Not only have George W. Bush and the
Iraq War architects skated away from meaningful accountability, but so too
have the media figures who provided the propaganda framework for the illegal
invasion, a break with a principle sternly enforced at Nuremberg, Peter Dyer wrote in
2008.

Imagine
the president,speaking
on Iraqfrom the
White House Press Briefing Room last Thursday, as the proverbial deer in the
headlights -- and it’s not difficult to guess just what those headlights
were. Think of them as Benghazi
on steroids. If the killing of an American ambassador, a Foreign
Service officer, and two CIA private security contractors could cause almost
two years of domestic political uproar, unending Republican criticism, and
potential damage to the president’s “legacy,” consider what an Iraq in shambles
and a terrorist state stretching across “the
Levant” might do. It’s hardly surprising, then, that a
president regularly described as “reluctant”
nonetheless stepped before the press corps and began the slow march back into
Iraq
and toward disaster.

It was a moment of remarkable contradictions. Obama managed, for
example, to warn against “mission creep” even as he was laying out what could
only be described as mission creep. Earlier that week, he had notified
Congress that 275 troopswould
be sentto Iraq, largely to defend the vast U.S. embassy in
Baghdad, once analmost
three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollarsymbol ofimperial
hubris, now awhite
elephantof the
first order. A hundred more military personnel were to be moved into
the region for backup.

Then on Thursday, the president added 300 “military advisers” drawn from
Special Operations forces and evidently meant to staff new “joint operation
centers in Baghdad and northern Iraq
to share intelligence and coordinate planning to confront the terrorist
threat.” (If you are of a certain age, that word “adviser” will ring an eerie
Vietnam-ish bell. You should, in fact, already be hearing a giant
sucking sound somewhere in the distance.) He also spoke vaguely of positioning
“additional U.S.
military assets in the region” into which the aircraft carrier USSGeorge
H.W. Bush, accompanied by a guided-missile cruiser and destroyer,
hadalready
sailed. And mind you, this was only thereasonably
public partof
whatever build-up is underway. While the president spoke of being
“prepared to take targeted and precise military action” in Iraq, at least one unnamed “senior
administration official” was already at workopening
upthe possibility
of air strikes in Syria.
“We don't restrict potential U.S.
action to a specific geographic space,” was the ominous way that official put
it.

In other words, short of combat troops on the ground in significant numbers,
thattableon which “all options” are always
kept open was visibly moved into Washington’s
War Room of the Levant. It’s quite a
development for a president who took special pride in getting us out of Iraq
(even though that departure wasengineeredby
the Bush administration, while Obama's officials tried to negotiate leaving a
force behind, only to be thwarted by the Iraqi government). In tandem
with the military moves, the president and his national security team,
perhaps reflecting through a glass darkly the “democracy agenda” of the Bush
era, also seemed to have dipped their fingers inpurple
ink.They
were reportedly pressuring Iraqi politicians to dump Prime Minister Maliki
and appoint a “unity” government to fight the war they want. (Adding to
the farcical nature of the moment, one name raised for Maliki’s position wasAhmed
Chalabi, once the darling of Bush-era officials and their choice
for that same post.)

There is, however, no way that an American intervention won’t be viewed as a
move to back the Shia side in an incipient set of civil wars, as even retired
general and former CIA director David Petraeuswarnedlast week. In fact, in opinion polls
Americansoverwhelmingly
rejectmilitary
intervention of any sort, just asevery
experiencein the
post-9/11 era should signal one simple lesson: Don’t do it! But Obama
and his top officials evidently can’t help themselves. The rising tide
of criticism-to-come is undoubtedly already pre-echoing in their heads --
previewed by the endless media appearances of Senator John McCain and astream
of op-edsfrom
former vice presidentDick
Cheney, former occupation proconsulL.
Paul Bremer III, and others from the crowd of “experts” who
created the Iraq disaster and for whom being wrong about that country is a
badge of honor.

We are clearly in the early stages of the intervention sweepstakes. The
initial moves may even be greeted asauspicious,
but watch out for the long-run destabilizing effects in an already chaotic
region. Washington
only imagines it can control such combustible situations. In reality,
it hasn’t in the past and it won’t be able to this time either, which means
unexpected ugliness will ensue. (And just wait until, in one of those
joint operation centers or elsewhere, the first Iraqi soldier, like hisAfghan
counterparts, turns his gun on one of those special ops advisers.)

All that’s missing at the moment is the final touch on the Obama version of
mission creep. I’m talking about the signature gesture for this
administration in its conflicts across the Greater Middle East (and
increasingly Africa). If you listen
carefully, you can already hear the theme music for the era rising in the
background and -- with apologies to Stephen Sondheim for mangling hisbeautiful
elegyto a lost
relationship -- it’s clearly “Send in the Drones.”

In the meantime, whatever the president is saying, he never mentioned
oil. No one does. Nor, generally, did the Bush administration
when it invaded and occupied Iraq.
If you paid attention to our media, you would never know that it sits on one
of the great, easily accessible fossil-fuel reserves on the planet, though
that should never be far from anyone’s mind. Fortunately, sociologist
Michael Schwartz, an old-timeTomDispatch
regular, is back after a long absence to remind us of The One Fact
in Iraq,
the one we should never forget. Tom

Events
in Iraq
are headline news everywhere, and once again, there is no mention of the
issue that underlies much of the violence: control of Iraqi oil. Instead, the
mediais
floodedwith debate
about, horror over, and extensive analysis of a not-exactly-brand-new
terrorist threat, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There are, in
addition, elaborate discussions about the possibility of a civil war thatthreatensboth a new round of ethnic cleansing
and the collapse of the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki.

Underway
are, in fact, “a series of urban revolts against the government,” as Middle
Eastern expert Juan Colehas
calledthem. They are currently restricted to Sunni areas of the
country and have a distinctly sectarian character, which is why groups like ISIS can thrive and even take a leadership role in
various locales. These revolts have, however, neither been created nor are
they controlled by ISIS and its several thousand fighters. Theyalso
involveformer
Baathists and Saddam Hussein loyalists, tribal militias, and many others. And
at least in incipient form they may not, in the end, be restricted to Sunni
areas. As theNew York Timesreportedlast
week, the oil industry is “worried that the unrest could spread” to the
southern Shia-dominated city of Basra, where “Iraq’s
main oil fields and export facilities are clustered.”

Under
the seething ocean
of Sunni discontent lies
a factor that is being ignored. The insurgents are not only in a struggle
against what they see as oppression by a largely Shiite government in Baghdad
and its security forces, but also over who will control and benefit from what
Maliki -- speaking for most of his constituents -- told theWall
Street Journalis
Iraq’s “national
patrimony.”

Less than one
week after the Pentagon generals announced new one-year deployment rotations to
the resurrected U.S. war in Iraq “for 10 to 15 to 20 years,” they also created
a new Marine Corps unit to fight in Iraq.

Despite
"withdrawal," thousands of U.S. troops to continue occupation.

With no public
discussion or explanation, the White House signed a new deal on Sept. 30 with
the government of Afghanistan to keep 10,000 U.S. troops occupying the country.
There is no plan or timeline for a full withdrawal of U.S. troops — ever.

The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee is set to vote on authorizing our latest war in Iraq and
Syria this week – perhaps on WEDNESDAY. Call your Senator before
the vote using this special toll-free* number: 877-429-0678. This number will
connect you with the Capitol Switchboard operator, and you can ask to be
connected to your Senator’s office.

You can say: “I am a
member of Veterans For Peace. I understand the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee will be debating the use of force against ISIL. I urge the
Senator to oppose authorizing force in Iraq and Syria. However, if there
are opportunities to constrain the use of force, such as by prohibiting
ground troops, I urge the Senator to support those constraints.”

With congressional
hawks set to take the reins of power in the Senate, this is our last best
chance to prevent further expansion of this new war.

Use of force will not
solve the problems that plague the region; indeed, violence has created many
of them. Instead, the U.S. needs to lead an effective response to stop
the violence perpetrated by ISIS and to help people in the region restore
security. (See statements by VFP and Win Without War.)

Remember, the holiday
break is another opportunity to meet with your Senators and Representatives
while they are in town.

Thank you for all you
do for peace!

Michael T. McPhearson

*Toll-free number provided by the Friends
Committee on National Legislation, a Win Without War coalition member

Ask Your
Representative to Co-Sponsor House Concurrent Resolution 105 to prevent US
Military Intervention in Iraq

Congressional
Switchboard: 202-224-3121

Historians Against the War came into existence,
as the United States was edging towards an unnecessary, illegal war against
Iraq. The subsequent invasion and occupation produced even more disastrous
consequences than many of us had anticipated. With that country now fragmenting
and its brutal government paralyzed, there are renewed calls for American
military intervention.

While we strongly support diplomatic initiatives to resolve this crisis,
we believe that American military action will only compound the suffering on
the ground and add to the instability of Iraq.

Yesterday 103 members of Congress, led by Representatives
Barbara Lee and Scott Rigell signed a letter to the President
discouraging military intervention and insisting that Congressional
authorization was required before any use of force in Iraq. Thanks to
those on this list, who contributed to this effort.

This has created momentum for an important new legislative initiative.
Reps. Jim McGovern (D-MA). Walter Jones (R-NC) and Barbara Lee (D-CA) have just
introduced House Concurrent Resolution # 105, a privileged resolution
under the War Powers Resolution that will force a debate and vote on U.S.
military intervention in Iraq. It will come up for a debate and vote within
fifteen days of the date in which it was filed

To be effective, many co-sponsors are needed. Although you may have done this
more times than you can count, please get on the phone and ask your member
of Congress to co-sponsor House Concurrent Resolution 105